The Haunting
by Sigridhr
Summary: Loki accidentally picks up a cursed necklace. The curse doesn't turn out at all like he expects.


**Notes: **I know this isn't one of the _many_ fics I've yet unfinished. Sorry. I just wanted to write something since I've been a bit uninspired of late.

* * *

Loki knows he's made a serious mistake the second he touches the necklace. He feels the surge of its power beneath his fingers, like fire crawling up his arm, and he tries to jerk his hand away. It's already too late.

He feels a familiar tug, like someone has reached in and yanked his internal organs forward, and he is flung forwards, off his feet and into an abyss. The last thing he hears is his name being called before it all goes dark.

Thor must be rubbing off on him. Only an idiot picks up a cursed object with their bare hands.

…

When Loki wakes up, his mouth full of dirt and his legs in a painfully awkward position he knows he'll be feeling later, Darcy is lying in the dirt beside him. She's still unconscious, her hair fanning out about her head like a halo and her sleeve drenched in blood from a ragged, angry looking cut on her forearm.

Loki sits up, giving his head a shake, and then swears profusely.

Thor must be rubbing off on both of them. Apparently there were two people stupid enough to touch _the same_ cursed object. He isn't sure how to process the thought that the girl must have grabbed the object in an effort to protect him. Or to stop him, he's not sure. But it's an act he doesn't understand – they've barely spoken, Darcy and he, and he's certainly given her no reason to come to his aid.

Darcy, much to Loki's annoyance, starts to regain consciousness as he stares at her.

"What the hell?" she says, starting to sit up and then falling back abruptly with a hiss of pain as she puts pressure on her injured arm. "Ow, goddammit."

"Masterful use of invective," Loki says, drily, sitting back and watching her speculatively. Darcy simply glares balefully at him.

"Get fucked," she says.

"Charming."

He suspects that if Darcy's arm were not injured, she'd be using it to slap him, but he doesn't much care. She's here with him – here in this curse-created reality, an alternate dimension created by the artefact, but as good as any prison – because of her own stupidity. But it was for his sake, and it drives him mad with fury and incredulity.

"Where are we?" Darcy asks, looking around.

The landscape is bleak, barren as a desert but not nearly so lovely. The ground is a pale grey, and the sky is a slightly lighter shade of the same. There are trees, though there are no leaves, and they stick up in the landscape, bent over at odd angles like broken marionettes.

"Trans-dimensional pocket," says Loki.

"Oh, good," Darcy says. Then, after a moment, "This looks like the sort of place where Walmarts go when they die."

He has no idea what a Walmart is, but he can't help but wonder what it's done to deserve such a miserable end.

…

He wanders off after a bit. It's a pointless task, looking for resources in this land. He can see out to the horizon and it's damn clear there's nothing here. But he looks anyway, just to give himself something to do. When he comes back Darcy is trying to bandage her own arm with the torn sleeve of her shirt. She's holding one end of it in her mouth as she winds it around her wrist, and he can see the grimace of pain on her face.

She had grabbed the necklace after him.

He sighs, tries not to swear, and then swats her hands away and carefully binds her arm tightly.

…

The problem with the Trans-Dimensional shithole he's been dumped in – well, scratch that, _one_ of the problems – is that he can see everything from any vantage point. There's nowhere to hide.

Darcy sticks out like a sore thumb, darting between trees as she pokes the ground with a stick and scuffs it with her boots. She's the only thing in colour in a world of grey, and his eyes follow her every move.

She's still favouring her arm, cradling it to her side, and she seems to be over-compensating for its lack of mobility with the other one. Waving the stick she's holding around like she's conducting a symphony, or fighting monsters – he's not sure which; he's not sure she's sure which – as she whacks the dead branches of the trees and they creak like old men's bones. It's an odd, soundless dance, full of pent up energy and vitality that paints bright streaks of light upon the landscape.

He can't look away.

…

The other big problem he has with this place – well, one of the other numerous problems, which he's beginning to compile in a list of grievances that he'll use to remind himself to never touch _goddamn_ cursed necklaces ever again – is that they don't eat, and they don't sleep.

It's simply nothingness – a void where they don't really exist. There is no sunrise or sunset, no meals, no sleep, nothing to break the monotony of the endless day. It's an exquisite form of torture, really. He's impressed. He'll have to track down the creator of the curse to thank them personally. With knives.

So, to fill up the great gaping maw of nothingness, Darcy talks.

Loki has never met anyone who talks as much as Darcy does. She talks incessantly, her hand fluttering all over the place like a bird trying to get out of a cage – to such an extent that he's almost surprised it doesn't fly off her body entirely. She talks to him about her life, about the things she's done, the things she's read, the things she wants to do. About her favourite childhood stories, about her favourite TV shows, her favourite pieces of journalism. She talks about politics, about how everyone running her country is a complete idiot (he doesn't disagree – he thinks all humans are idiots on principle), about reforms that have happened, reforms that should happen. She talks about a bright future where things aren't grey and the trees aren't dead.

It clicks, finally, when he's sitting through an interminable lecture on Darcy's thoughts on healthcare reforms. She's talking to keep her home alive. She's talking like she's going to go back.

So, he begins to speak too.

…

Loki talks about Asgard. He talks his childhood, his favourite children's stories, his favourite poems. He talks about visiting Midgard in the past, and nearly bursts out laughing at the mix of rapture and disgust on Darcy's face at his extremely detailed description of a Viking settlement.

He talks about magic, and Darcy peppers him with questions he's never thought to ask himself: what does it feel like? What's the weirdest thing he can do? If you turn an inanimate object into a living creature, can that creature breed? Does it have a soul? Does it exist independent of him – if he died, would it revert back to its original form? If he changes shape, does the Loki that he was die in some way the instant his form is disassembled?

He can't answer them, but she doesn't seem to mind.

…

Darcy is the one who finds the flower.

It's pale pink, and, frankly, sickly, but it's _pale pink_ in a world that he's fairly certain has never heard of pink, and it's sticking up defiantly, covered in a fine layer of grey dust. Darcy brushes it off carefully, and cradles the flower gently.

"I didn't think there was anything growing here."

For a moment, Loki's heart sputters and stops in his chest. There's a faint breeze now, and he hears the rustling of the branches of the trees, creaking and snapping cantankerously like they're furious at the interruption to their endless stillness. It picks up the loose strands of Darcy's hair, blowing them across her cheek and the flower's petals flutter, like butterfly wings, in the shelter of her hand.

He tries very hard not to think of metaphors.

…

"What's the stupidest thing you've ever done?"

They're lying on their backs, staring up at the grey, starless sky. Darcy's stretched out over as much space as she can possibly manage. There's certainly plenty to go around.

"Touching the necklace that brought us here."

Darcy laughs loudly, and it rings in the space around them, filling it up. "Bullshit," she says.

…

He's not sure how long they've been there, sitting in the grim pale light of the empty landscape, but about six long conversations (and considerably more sessions where Darcy simply talked and Loki attempted perfect the art of telekinetic homicide) after the flower turns up, the sun rises.

It casts a thin, pale yellow light over the dust, turning it told pale gold. Slowly but surely, it crept up over the horizon, bathing his world in warmth for the first time since he's arrived.

Darcy watches in silence – the quietest he'd seen her since they arrived – her knees drawn up to her chest. "It's beautiful," she says at last.

She has a halo of soft auburn hair that's all but glowing in the light. It's half falling in her face, and he can see the bright red of her shirt (looking a bit odd for the fact that it's missing a sleeve), the pale pink of her cheeks, the red of her lips. The sunlight makes her look alive – remote and beautiful, like an oasis in the desert.

She turns and gives him a half smile, and his hands clench into fists to keep from tangling her hair, and tangling his tongue in her mouth.

He can't deny it any longer.

…

This is an entirely different sort of torture.

Everything in the landscape seems to gravitate towards Darcy. She directs it, like the conductor of a symphony. The branches dance to the music only she can hear, and the sun sets her hair aglow until something within him seems to break. No matter where he turns she seems to suffuse the world around him, and he cannot be rid of her. He aches, with needs and wants he cannot fully articulate.

He traces the negative space around her figure. The shapes her body makes when she moves her hands, the line of her neck, the space between her elbow and her breasts. He maps them all as she maps the landscape. Every day now she's finding something else – a few flowers, and a smattering of cacti, and she looks after all of them, almost maternal in her diligence. He's just as diligent in his own studies as he watches her work.

When he closes his eyes he still sees her, like an imprint of her body, all soft curves and waving hands, and he wants to scream.

…

"You've been staring at me," Darcy says, matter-of-factly.

Loki doesn't know what to say. There's nothing to say, really. He does stare at her.

"It's OK," Darcy says. "I don't mind."

…

He doesn't know what he's waiting for. He feels as if he is teetering on the edge of some vast brink, staring down into depths he cannot fathom. He wants to be weightless, but instead he is mortally afraid of gravity.

Darcy flits in and out of his space now. She brushes her shoulders against his when they talk, nudging him playfully. She curls up next to them as they lie down in the darkness, still beneath a starless sky. She places slim hands on his shoulders and watches him when he speaks with a kind of attentiveness that makes him feel strangely unclothed and raw. She smiles at his stories and squeezes his hands in her own when he admits something personal.

And he still can't bridge the gap.

It's not for lack of wanting. He's barraged by impulses: to take her into his arms, to take her beneath the sunrise, watching the sunlight change the colour of her hair against the dirt, to see it reflected in her eyes…

But he worries, secretly, that once they take the leap from wanting to having, there will be nothing left here to strive for.

…

His self-control, such as it is, snaps finally. She's got a hand on his shoulder, giving it a gentle squeeze as she gets up to see to the flowers she tends to, and he simply grabs hold of it and pulls her towards him.

She collapses into his lap with a laugh and a muttered "finally" before she kisses him so soundly he utterly forgets to breathe. He tastes life on her lips – musty, earthy and sweet, and he pulls her closer. She turns in his lap, straddling his hips and scraping her nails across his scalp until he arches up into her.

They fall together in a tangle of limbs and scattered clothing, too entwined to properly get anything off, and Darcy is laughing the whole time while he swears in frustration. It's hardly erotic, and they've both got dirt in places he really can't care to mention, but there's something about the way she's got her hips canted up and her knee hooked over his hip, about the way her lips are parted and her hands are clenching and unclenching against the skin of his shoulder as he drives into her that is simply _perfect_.

In private contemplation (because he'd never admit to thinking something so insufferably romantic) it reminds him of when they first found the flower. Hardly the most artful specimen of its type, but it was bright and bold in a world so utterly unsuited to it, and it was undoubtedly beautiful.

…

He does take Darcy, just as the sun rises. He watches the light creep over her skin, and follows it with his tongue, catching it between his teeth and tasting the difference between sun-warmed Darcy and grey Darcy. He runs his fingers through her hair and pulls apart all the different shades of red and brown he can find, and she watches him quietly, with a soft, indulgent smile that makes him bend down and trail kisses downward and downward until she calls out his name under the first light of day.

…

Then, as abruptly as it started, it is over. He is ripped from her arms, from the world that they had made, and he finds himself clinging to the lab bench in Jane Foster's laboratory, pale and shaking.

"Loki," Thor says, stepping forward and wrapping a hand around Loki's forearm, holding him up. "We were growing concerned."

Loki can do little but stare dazedly around the room.

Darcy is standing on the far side of the room, behind Jane. She doesn't look at all as if she's been ripped from their home and thrown unceremoniously back to Midgard.

"Are you alright?" Loki asks, looking straight at her.

Darcy looks utterly flabbergasted, and frowns at him. "Uh, yes. Are you?"

"Brother?" Thor asks, sounding concerned.

"I'm not your brother," Loki mutters, more out of habit than anything else. He stands up, shaking off Thor's hold. "What happened?"

"When you touched the necklace you went into a sort of trance," Jane says, edging slowly towards them. "I thought you were going to faint."

Loki glares as balefully as he can manage at her. "How long?" he snaps.

"Uh, maybe ten seconds?" Jane says. "I'm not sure."

"_Ten seconds_?" Loki echoes incredulously.

Darcy is still standing on the other side of the room, watching him. "And you –" he asks sharply, looking straight at her, "you did not touch the necklace?"

"No," Darcy says. And he sees at last that she's not _his_ Darcy. She's foreign, like someone has taken over Darcy's body and left a doppelgänger in her place. He shudders, stepping back, and she just watches him, brow furrowed in confusion.

The lab seems to go oddly grey as he turns on his heel and walks abruptly from the room.

…

He sees Darcy sometimes in the hallway. She acknowledges him with a polite smile, but he just turns away. He can't look at her – not when he sees nothing but a stranger looking back at him.

He remembers the way she laughed, the way she tugged her shirt off with a loose-limbed reckless abandon that drove him absolutely wild. The way she would sleep, one arm flung carelessly over his waist, and they'd take turns whispering the filthiest puns they could think of in each other's ears while pretending to be oblivious.

When he sees her talking in the lab, all he can think of is the way he has traced each of her fingers with his tongue, and the way she used to talk only to _him_.

She corners him, finally, one day.

"You've been staring at me," she says, and his mind flickers back to the last time she'd said those words. But this time, it's not OK.

"You asked me when that weird thing happened with the necklace if I'd touched it," Darcy says shrewdly. He feels caught, claustrophobic, and he wants to go back, back to the way things were, back to _their_ place. "What did you see? What did it have to do with me?"

He doesn't answer; he just stares at her and she stares back accusingly.

"Stop staring at me," she says.

If only he could.

…

It takes him several months to track down the true provenance of the necklace. He's happy to do it – it gives him a reason to leave, and a mission to focus on. But his heart sinks to his feet when he learns the precise details of the curse.

The necklace cursed the recipient with the chance to experience the one thing they've always wanted most, so that they might be forever haunted by its absence.

Loki watches Darcy across the lab as she laughs at something Jane says, her hair aglow in the sunlight coming in through the window and her back turned to him. The shape of her body, the way she holds herself, the way her hands move, none of it is quite right. She's like an echo of the woman he remembers, enough like her to torment him, but never close enough to touch.


End file.
